When all the stars are falling down

When I was 14 or thereabouts, I was assigned as a home teaching companion to one Brother Barr (not his real name), a somewhat eccentric lawyer who, like the Dormouse in Alice, seemed perpetually on the verge of falling asleep. Some years later, when Brother Barr became a counselor to the bishop and used to sit up in front of the congregation every Sunday, counting how many times he nodded off and jerked awake again was an amusing way of whiling away the occasional dull sacrament meeting. (He always sat with one leg crossed over the other, and the moment his chin hit his chest, his leg would start bouncing up and down spasmodically, waking him up for another few minutes. It really was quite entertaining.)

But what was harmless fun when it occurred in church was rather another matter when Brother Barr was behind the wheel of a moving automobile -- which was the situation when he took me out home teaching. We covered a rather rural part of Ohio, which meant long drives along silent country roads after dark, and I spent those drives -- well, "in a state of abject terror" would be an exaggeration, but "braced for impact" would not -- and I must admit the whole experience sowed doubts in my mind as to whether forbidding the use of coffee were really the most effective way of fending off the destroying angel.

In an effort to keep him awake, I used to have Brother Barr regale me with tales of his misspent youth -- and by "misspent" I am of course referring to the game of Dungeons & Dragons. I heard his (predictably, somewhat eccentric) D&D stories again and again. The time he killed the Great Granddaddy of Assassins ("I just shot him. Saw him flying around overhead and just shot him!"). The time he faced a bad guy who was surrounded by a reddish-gold cloud which -- get this -- turned out to be a red dragon and a gold dragon flying around in circles so fast that they looked like a cloud! Eventually, though, the familiar tales of derring-do would peter out, and Brother Barr would have recourse to the old standby of cranking the air-conditioning up to eleven and playing the radio.

One night the radio happened to be playing "Melancholy Man" by the Moody Blues. I had just recently become interested in that band but had not yet acquired that particular album, and so it got my attention. I thought it certainly sounded like the Moodies but wasn't entirely sure, so I listened very closely, hoping the DJ would mention the band's name at the end.

The reason I remember this all so clearly is what happened during the song. Just as Mike Pinder sang, "When all the stars are falling down," a positively gigantic meteor, like a long-tailed fireball, streaked downwards across the sky in front of us and disappeared behind the trees.

I've never had any sense of direction, but I nevertheless felt quite certain that my house was in that direction and that the meteor "had my name on it." Throughout the rest of the drive I was lost in a fantasy of coming home and finding a smoldering crater where my house had been -- perhaps with an outsize mushroom or two.

Meteorites breed giant mushrooms.
Surely everyone knows this.

Of course in the end I found -- with a sense of relief tinged with disappointment -- that the shooting star had not struck my house and that everything was just as it had always been, but the fantasy had been so extraordinarily vivid, and I had felt so sure about it, that it has stayed with me all these years and still comes to mind every time I hear "Melancholy Man."